Geographic Expansion & Outsourcing

Below are some example uses and benefits of fiber optic infrastructure for all forms of communication. Have questions, feedback or ideas to share? Contact us.

Drawings and Documents – Some companies such as architectural firms, publishers and printers deal with large documents that can take a long time to downloaded need to be version managed and spooled to other devices such as printers. Productivity of the personnel and equipment is dependent upon the speed and accuracy at which these are transferred. Documents are becoming bigger and more complex (e.g. high resolution, color, formatting, embedded objects such as video). The size of a document with embedded video and images could be GBs per page.

Analytics – In many cases, the mass of information is not very meaningful without analysis. Weather and climate data is a good example. Measuring, calculating, tracking, and visualizing powerful storms is an important tool is keeping people and property as safe as possible.

Webinars – Webinars have now become an integral part of selling and providing customer support. These require high quality, high speed delivery services.

Call centers – Call centers have special needs including extremely complex VOIP—often over several time zones—that allow agents to sign on as they begin their days. The VOIP is needed because agent sign-on for local systems can only incorporate units on the same LAN.

Outsourced IT – For many companies, the IT task as it expands to include everything from laptops to phones to building security to networks to racks of computes, have opted to Outsource the IT function. This creates special issues on the network because the people performing functions will have to have special capability such as remote ability to boot and input in the systems securely. There are everyday businesses like metal fabricators that are using these services today.

Distributed Facilities – As an organization grows, it can be a wise and practical decision to separate some of the people, systems and processes into different facilities or locations. There are programs such as telecommuting, outsourcing, and JIT operations that are not only separated, but may be different companies with different policies on their systems. Often private connections (such as virtual private networks, or VPNs) are desirable. When facilities are required to be connected via public telecom networks, those networks can significantly increase the cost of the operation.

Alternate Site Operations – Some facilities, such as banks or stock markets, cannot wait for a restore. These operations will have a completely redundant operations ready to take over on queue, to provide nonstop operations. Fast access for an efficient switchover is an imperative. There are leaders in these fields that might find San Leandro attractive.

Hosting – One special kind of distributed environment involves a hosting facility, where an application such as monitoring or analytics is located in a data center. This can be done for a number of reasons, but the principle one is the reliably of the power. A power outage causes significant disruptions. Data centers often have their own substation and backup generators. Hosting is also used for particular applications like Microsoft Exchange services.

Multi-tenant hosts – Multi-tenant hosting is an operating system and network-level facility (e.g. Windows Server 8). If a company does not want to use publicly available hosting services, it must have equipment that allows participation in an organization-based or community cloud that would allow an application or operator to programmatically change aspects of the network. This requires sophisticated network equipment that is not normally available. It might also require resources and monitoring software that would allow each user to be charged for what they use only.

Public Cloud – Many computer-based operations are being redesigned to operate in the “Cloud.” Companies such as Amazon.com and Microsoft are attempting to monetize the excess capacity of their data centers by offering cloud services. This is called platform as a service (PaaS). The economics behind the clouds requires that people share these complex resources over a network, so the costs per user goes down. There are entire industries in networking and software that are ready to establish relationships with community developers who can speak their language and begin to understand their needs for connectivity, power, and other resources.

Private/community clouds – Given the rapid expansion of storage and processor capability, operating in the “Cloud” is an obvious trend for companies that provide their software as a service (SaaS) (e.g. Salesforce.com) from their own data centers. Their many thousands of customers communicate with these data centers using a web browser with very little permanent data on the client side. One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is elasticity—the ability to scale to millions of users and processors as needed. For example when Microsoft offers patches to their 850,000,000 customers, their system can scale to allow communication with many countries around the world, while minimizing disruptions on national networks. A community cloud also has an additional advantage: the community can select common policies (e.g. security) that are specific to their needs. For example, patient records fall under HIPPA and have requirements that would be specific to the health care industry.